Summary of the Indigenous Struggles of the Maasai People

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The Maasai land is geographically located in Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania. This area is otherwise known as the Great Rift Valley. The Maasai consider, “the valley” to be their native grounds and refer to it as “The Cradle of Mankind”. However, the government has begun to view this land as valuable and has reduced the Maasai land by a great deal, primarily taking the best land and leaving the dry, arid parts in which the Maasai have little use.
The Maasai people are almost completely dependent on their land as they are a semi-nomadic culture. Hearding livestock such as cattle, goats and sheep is one of their greatest occupations and they rely upon the planes and feeding grounds of the great rift valley to do so. They also rely upon the scarce water source of the valley for the hydration of their cattle.
The Maasai people originated in Northern Kenya and migrated south along the Nile Valley around the mid fifteenth century. They then found themselves in the Great Rift Valley, at which time they pronounced the land sacred to their culture. Though the government did not fully remove the Maasai of their native land, they have reduced their land occupation by a great deal.
Though the Maasai people live of the land, like most indigenous cultures, the do not farm or grow crops, as it is against their belief system to break soil.
The indigenous struggles of the Maasai people and their history of conflict is quite similar to the struggles faced by Canada’s Natives. During the nineteenth century Africa saw increasing western encroachment into Kenya. This took the form of missionaries and explorers. The missionaries were keen to convert tribes to Christianity, stop slave trading and abolish some of the Maasai practices which they perceived as barbaric (such as dressing almost naked, and drinking cows

arts, wildlife and other cultural materials regarding the Kenyan culture.
Two of the 42 communities in Kenya have tried to maintain their original traditions and culture through thick and thin and thus attract very many tourists. They are the Maasai community and the coastal region communities,. As we will see ahead we shall cover on the coastal region communities for our topic of today.
Higher institutions of learning also have played a big role in preserving culture from swift erosion. Credit

in African history (e.g. Asiwaju (1985); Dowden (2008); Wesseling (1996)) argues that the main impact of Europeans’ inﬂuence in Africa was not colonization per se, but the improper border design. Partitioning, the argument goes, has led to ethnic struggles, patronage politics, and spurred civil conﬂict and underdevelopment. Yet there is little -if any- work that formally examines the impact of ethnic partitioning.2 This study is a ﬁrst step to empirically assess the long-run eﬀects of the scramble

development models (different organizational structures to involve farmers). Secondly, developing a value chain in a certain way can also help to alleviate poverty and thirdly, it can help to deal with sustainability issues. The challenge is to involve poor people in the economic development process of this chain by using the right business development model, while respecting sustainability criteria and remaining competitive. The interrelations between these concerns are depicted in figure 1.
Figure 1